Emporia State’s counseling center offers guidance and an understanding ear to those that need it.

“I had a lot of anger displacement issues and issues from the past with my family,” said Michael Gilbert, junior crime and delinquency studies major. “I thought they’d go away in college, but they were effecting my daily interactions with others. I was tired of feeling angry and worthless, so I finally decided to go to the counseling center.”

ESU’s counseling center provides multiple free services for ESU students that include Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention, ADHD screening and depression screening.

“I hope all students get these services if they need them,” said Sally Crawford-Fowler, assistant director of student wellness of the counseling center. “We stay very busy here, and most of us have full case loads.”

The staff has noticed a lessening of the stigmas that used to be associated with mental health treatment Crawford-Fowler said.

“I think the tradition of needing to pull yourself up by your bootstraps is slowly going away,” Crawford-Fowler said. “People sometimes need guidance through these times, and we’re here for them when they want it.”

Students today have more on their plates and it causes them to need more counseling than past generations, said Anita Bodkin, counselor for the ESU counseling center.

“College students today are juggling a lot more than in the past,” Bodkin said. “A lot of them come in with issues that they haven’t addressed before college or that didn’t exist until college.”

The counseling center’s staff take pride in their profession and enjoy being able to help students resolve their problems.

“I like working with the clients here,” Bodkin said. “The population we deal with is very appealing to me.”

The counseling center’s treatment and counseling can help people, particularly if they desire to help themselves, Gilbert said.

“I had a very positive experience at the counseling center,” Gilbert said. “There are things that people will have to learn to accept if they get counseling. They can’t change other people or how the world is but they can change their view of the world.”

The staff acknowledges that not every individual has their particular problems solved with the counseling center’s guidance.

“I wish I could say all issues are resolved and they’re ok like everybody else,” Bodkin said. “Unfortunately sometimes they need help beyond what we have here, but we can refer them if it is needed.”

Staff members hope that more students will take advantage of the services offered by the center.

“I’d like to see more students use us,” Bodkin said. “I think we can be a huge help, especially since our services are free.”

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In a crowd of several hundred, nearly all of the students had a Facebook account. But what worried Janet Judge, collegiate sports lawyer, was the content of each student’s page.

“Anything that (students) put up on the internet is no longer theirs,” Judge said. “(Students) have to think about the implications of putting things up.”

Judge delivered the speech “Developing your personal brand: The Power of Facebook” on Monday to an audience that was mostly comprised of student-athletes at Emporia State.

“The majority of things that I said about student athletes apply across the board,”
Judge said. “The same thing about being careful about the kind of pictures that you are posting and the kind of things that you are writing, these are all important things.”

Her focus was how student-athletes represent themselves and their universities.

“When you mess up, the headlines are that you play on a certain team and that’s what people remember,” Judge said.

Judge discussed hazing, social networks and alcohol as a representative of the NCAA. She has presented at 100 schools in the last two years on a grant from the NCAA.

“She was really informative and she made things known that you wouldn’t necessarily know was happening online or on Facebook,” said Loryn Zoglmann, sophomore elementary education major and member of the Stingers. “If you aren’t a student athlete, I think it all still applies to you.

“You don’t want people to know things or see pictures of you that aren’t flattering. And even people who aren’t student athletes get the shirts that represent their school and if they are out doing things, they wouldn’t want their school to have a bad name because of it.”

According to an Alfred University study on hazing that Judge presented, one in five student-athletes surveyed had been subjected to illegal hazing, two in five student-athletes consumed alcohol on recruiting visits and it is estimated that 250,000 student athletes were hazed in the survey year.

While hazing is illegal in every state, Judge said it still happens. However, students only get caught if they document the events with photos and put them online.

“I thought that she would be a good candidate to come and talk to our campus because Facebook and sexting is new and cutting edge,” said Carmen Leeds, associate athletic director. “We wanted to educate the students about it.”

Sexting was also a topic that Judge brought up because the consequences of sending explicit texts and revealing photos to others can be just as damaging posting photos online. Things sent through text message can be posted online just as easily.

One thing that Judge was adamant about was the need for students to pay attention to who is viewing their pages on social networking sites. She said that with the new privacy settings on Facebook, students may need to reset their privacy settings and should always keep them on “Only Friends.”

“A lot of people see what’s on Facebook and they don’t even realize (that it’s bad),” Leeds said. “We want students to be smart so that they could get a job one day and not have anything come back to haunt them.”

Judge used examples of students from other schools who have had consequences for things that were posted online including photos and twitter statuses.

“There were a bunch of football players who were waiting for their coach for a team meeting,” she said. “One of the players was disgruntled and got on his twitter account and wrote ‘I wonder why my own coach can’t show up on time to his own team meeting.’”

“His coach opens up the newspaper the next morning and on the front page of the sports section is that tweet with his picture. Nobody on the Texas Tech football team has a Twitter account anymore.”

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